The Ledge

An Adventure Story of Friendship and Survival on Mount Rainier

In June 1992, Jim Davidson and Mike Price stood triumphantly atop Washington's Mount Rainier, celebrating what they hoped would be the first of many milestones in their lives as passionate young mountaineers. Instead, their conquest gave way to catastrophe when a cave-in plunged them deep inside a glacial crevasse. Trapped on a narrow, unstable frozen ledge, deep below daylight and high above a yawning chasm, Davidson would desperately battle crumbling ice and snow that threatened to bury him alive, while struggling in vain to save his fatally injured companion. Finally, with little equipment, no partner, and rapidly dwindling hope, he would have to make a fateful choice -- between the certainty of a slow, lonely death or the seeming impossibility of climbing for his life.